I grew up at a time when there was nothing on earth – nor in space – that the US could not accomplish. Whatever the challenge: scientific, military, medicinal, geographical… the Americans could find the answer.

Yet less than 50 years after America reached the moon, these days they seem to find it a struggle, as a nation, to drag their bloated bodies down to the nearest Mickey Ds.

A case in point: the building of a high-speed railway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (see the computerised impression of how it might look, above).

This plan, recently revived yet again, has been around for decades. Yet the nation which, 150 years ago, brought the Iron Horse through the Rockies at lightning speed, seems unable to build a line through swathes of empty desert.

Why? You could also ask why America's formerly mighty railway system has dwindled to a ramshackle shadow of its once illustrious grandeur.

The answer is the motor car. Having your own car and driving it wherever you want with cheap gas is the acme of libertarian capitalism.

The fact that, at most times on the LA freeway system, nobody goes anywhere in their cars because the roads are jammed is irrelevant.

Lady Thatcher once observed that anyone over the age of 30 seen on a bus can be counted a failure. Americans seem to hold pretty similar views regarding travelling on trains: planes and cars are the only approved ways of getting around – trains are for failures.

So while Europe, China and Japan thrill to the idea of high-speed trains, America demurs. They would rather burn up dwindling supplies of oil so that they can sit in their gas guzzling-cars.

Actually, not every European country is thrilled by high speed rail – another nation is slow to come to this particular party.

27 March 2012 5:59 PM

Yesterday’s dramatic news story about film director James Cameron’s plunge to the deepest point on Earth will have provoked a variety of responses in those who read it.

The first must be raw surprise that a man can descend by himself, as Cameron did, to the bottom of the Marianas Trench – a netherworld a full seven miles below the surface of the Pacific Ocean – and return unharmed. Then there is curiosity as to what you might find (other than thick, thick darkness) at a depth of 10,898 metres – an incomparable figure which ensures that, were you to drop Mount Everest into the Trench, its summit would still sit a mile below the waterline. Utter indifference probably rears its head too – at the antics of a multi-millionaire movie mogul who has both the time and the money to make his Jules Verne dreams come true. And there is surely an element of wonder that anyone would want to trace a path into a place where few species can hope to survive.

For my part, my first reaction was one of green-gilled jealousy. Much like space travel, the advanced pursuit of dropping down through countless fathoms is likely to remain a concern only for the considerably rich for the foreseeable future. Indeed, Cameron is the first person to visit the Marianas Trench in half a century, and the first to do it solo (the feat was initially accomplished by the pioneering Swiss-American team of Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in January 1960) – and the next maverick out of the hutch and under the surface looks set to be Richard Branson, who has reacted to Cameron’s jaunt by announcing his own attempt on the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest point in the Atlantic.

If I'm honest with myself, the idea of sliding down and down into sub-aqua blackness in a yellow submarine (or lime-green, in Cameron’s case) fills me more with fear than any true urge to do this for myself (I’m barely at home 20 metres below in scuba gear).

But the thought that this is possible – that a person can reach not just the highest point of the planet, but its lowest – surely appeals to anyone with a love of travel. For the answer to the question of why anyone would bother to embark on an odyssey to the pit of the Marianas Trench is the same as has applied to any grand endeavour since early man first sat in a coracle and paddled off towards the unknown side of the river: Because it’s there.

I was thinking along similar lines a few weeks ago when I landed in the small, southerly outpost of Punta Arenas – a port that lurks towards the lowest ebb of Chile, where the flicky tail of South America curves out towards Antarctica. This – the scattered fragments of southerly Patagonia and the misty isles of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago – is an incredibly dramatic realm of raw beauty and remote grandeur, and I would recommend it to anyone who likes their holidays even vaguely on the intrepid side (Chilean specialists Cruceros Australis, for example, do a cruise that charts these cold glacier-dotted waters).

My first thought on driving into Punta Arenas was one of mild astonishment. As you pass through the outskirts of town, you inevitably notice the Nao Victoria Museum – an exact replica of the ship used by the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan when he ventured this way in his bid to circumnavigate the globe between 1519 and 1522 (Magellan did not make it all the way back to Seville, dying in the Philippines en route – but the Nao Victoria did). A small, dinky galleon, you would not – by modern sailing standards – trust it to ferry you across a park boating lake, and yet Magellan used it to tackle the full width of the planet. The reason for doing so? Amongst others (money, fame, the medieval power struggle between Spain and Portugal), because no-one had, at that point, sailed entirely around the world – and because the possibility of doing so was there. In bearing his name, the Strait of Magellan – the inland passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans that the great man discovered (give or take the odd thousand members of the indigenous tribes who already knew of it) – pay tribute to his efforts.

The extreme and least accessible corners of the planet are always likely to attract a certain sort of traveller. This probably explains why – in my own small way – a few days after calling at Punta Arenas, I found myself standing on Cape Horn. This, of course, is the fabled lower tip of South America (and indeed, the very base of the non-Antarctic portion of the globe as a whole) – a place of mists, myths and legends where the Atlantic and Pacific meet, the waters churn, and may a vessels has come to grief.

In reality, there is not much to see at Cape Horn (see the photo above). It is a craggy little islet, covered in gorse and long grass, where the rain (usually) howls down and a lone lighthouse keeps an eye on the waves. It looks not unlike one of the Shetland Islands (in fact, the latitude is not that dissimilar – Cape Horn lies at 55° 58′ 47″ S, Lerwick, the Shetland capital, at 60° 9' 0" N), and once you’ve posed for a photo by the sculpture (two conjoined pieces of metal cleverly shaped so that they form the silhouette of an albatross in flight) that is the only other landmark in this damp 'destination', you have largely ‘done’ the Cape Horn experience. But that hardly matters. The point is that – as the end of the line; the station buffers for a continent; the final stop, everybody off – it is there.

Of course, as the caveat attached to every news piece about James Cameron – that someone else has already 'conquered' the Marianas Trench – show, there are very few, if any, 'firsts' left when it comes to visiting these ultimate locations. The highest mountains have been climbed, the longest rivers navigated, the oceans crossed.

But that will never lessen the appeal of a visit to a tallest/lowest/most southerly. Given the chance, I would follow up Cape Horn by visiting the North Cape – the steep cliffs that, scything into the waves on the Norwegian island of Mageroya, are deemed to act as the northernmost edge of the European continent (although Cape Nordkinn, which lurks on the Norwegian mainland, rather than an island, might well dispute this).

And I'd be interested to know where – given the opportunity – which far-flung spot on the map readers would head for. Or whether you would take one look at the photo of Cape Horn, shrug, laugh at James Cameron, and book a break in the Seychelles.

Does James Cameron's dive to the bottom of the Pacific fill you with curiosity and wanderlust? Or can you think of nothing worse? Tell us what you think...

23 March 2012 3:37 PM

I realise I may be a Miserable Old Git, but why can't parents stop their children misbehaving?

This inaction is particularly annoying when you have out of control toddlers charging around an otherwise peaceful Austrian mountain hotel.

More MOG-ness, I'm afraid – but is there much point in taking toddlers on a ski holiday in the first place? What is there in a ski resort for tiny tots to enjoy?

Parents keen to live as normal a life as possible seem to have two options. They can dump their little darlings in the hotel kids club. Or else - and this seems the more common option - they bring grandparents to serve as unpaid child minders.

Based on a week's observation in the wholly charming surrounds of Oberlech, I have to tell you that most grandparents on ski trips are absolutely useless child minders.

At 4pm every afternoon at the hotel pool, calmness and serenity would be shattered when granny turned up with a four-year-old and two-year-old - and simply acted as a spectator as her charges ran riot. Krakatoa erupting can scarcely have been less irritating.

When I raised my eyes from my book to treat Granny to a bit of a glare, she grinned conspiratorially: 'Kids – what can you do with them,' she seemed to be suggesting.

I had one or two suggestions. Shut them up, for a start. Just because they're small, it doesn't mean they have any right to spoil anybody else's holiday.

Do you remember the time when the received wisdom on children was that they should be seen and not heard? When parents or guardians didn't think it was proper behaviour on their part to let children tear round a swimming pool screaming as if they were pursed by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

When you book into a hotel, you effectively sign a contract to behave with consideration for other guests – and to make sure your children behave.

I may be a Miserable Old Git, but I have rights…

Is Frank right? Do parents have a responsibility to keep their children quiet on holiday? Or does everyone have the right to have fun - especially toddlers? Have your say.

16 March 2012 11:56 AM

The wrecking of the Costa Concordia has knocked the cruise industry sideways.

Have a look at any of the cruise discount websites (such as www.cruise118.com, for example) and you can see that while the accident happened over two months ago, it is still having an impact.

A five-night Royal Caribbean cruise in the Mediterranean – beginning and ending at Barcelona next month – is currently available for £459, including return flights from the UK.

At a rough estimate return UK flights are likely to cost in the region of £200, which means that once theagency commission has been removed, Royal Caribbean is barely making a couple of hundred pounds from the transaction.

Even if this amount just about covers costs, like all cruise lines they hope to make a profit from onboard sales, particularly at the bar.

But it goes to show that if you don't have anything planned for the next couple of months, you could profitably look for a cut-price cruise.

The Costa troubles (let’s not forget their more recent problem with the fire on board the Costa Allegra in the Indian Ocean, which led to the stricken vessel having to be towed to the Seychelles) are casting a shadow.

Research shows that those who were contemplating a cruise holiday for the first time have been postponing their booking.

But don’t expect these bargain basement prices to last forever.

If there is one thing that history has taught us, it is that no potential risk or hazard is too great if there is a cheap holiday in the offing.

13 March 2012 7:36 PM

This snippet of news may have passed you by (and indeed, it has not been reported on a wide basis in the UK), but the weekend witnessed a farewell in a corner of the planet that was akin to a bedside vigil ahead of a life-support system being turned off.

Perhaps that is an overly dramatic description – but Saturday and Sunday were certainly emotional days in Christchurch, where this 48-hour window marked a last chance to pay a 'visit' to the New Zealand city’s iconic cathedral, before its demolition.

This grand Victorian building has become a stark symbol of the earthquakes that struck Christchurch last year – in July, December, but most shockingly on February 22. The 6.3-magnitude of this notorious tremor led to the deaths of 185 people, and toppled the cathedral steeple to the ground – marking this elegant example of Victorian architecture as a horribly visible reminder of New Zealand’s annus horribilis.

Built in stages between 1864 and 1904 (its creation stuttered due to monetary issues), the cathedral had managed to withstand everything that the infamously unstable ground on which New Zealand sits had had to throw at it – but the events of 13 months ago have proved too much. On March 2 (2012), it was announced that the building is too badly damaged for reconstruction to be possible (as well as the snapping of the spire, parts of the roof caved in), and that a careful process of 'deconstruction' will reduce it to a bare shell of two-to-three metres. A new cathedral may appear on the city skyline – but this process will take years rather than months, and there are no plans to carve out a faithful replica of the lost building. According to local church authorities, to do so would cost somewhere in excess of NZ$100million (£53million) – a figure that, in the current financial climate, is completely unfeasible.

Christchurch has reacted to the news with understandable dismay (imagine if, rather than being at the centre of headlines about protests against capitalism, the main news story surrounding St Paul’s over the last few months had been its imminent dismantling), with over 31,000 people making their way to Cathedral Square across the weekend to cast a last glance at the wreck in their midst. Sunday was the final opportunity to tread the walkway that has allowed close access to the site.

Now the men in orange jackets will move in. And while the breaking-down of the doomed structure will be sensitively managed (as Bishop Victoria Matthews of the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch put it recently:'The cathedral will be deconstructed with the utmost care and respect, while at the same time protecting the treasures within its walls – there will be no bulldozers or wrecking balls on the job') the arrival of the end for this 19th century landmark will leave a hole in the city. Not a hole that equates in importance to the deaths of 185 people. But a hole nonetheless.

I'm including this in this site's Travel Blog because I feel a curious connection to the story. I found myself in New Zealand in the immediate aftermath of last February's earthquake – not as a news reporter chasing the trail of destruction, but as a travel writer intent on exploring a nation that, in many senses, is the edge of the Earth.

My journey around the country was, of course, impacted by the disaster (although I wasn’t there when the quake happened, I flew in just four days afterwards). Christchurch, which had been part of my initial plans, obviously fell from the itinerary – but the effects of the quake were visible in numerous ways: the information boards offering advice and support for worried relatives landing at Auckland airport; the huge icebergs that had dropped into the lake at the foot of the Tasman Glacier in Mount Cook National Park – colossal chunks of hard-compacted blue ripped from the mountain by the sheer force of the tremor; the bake sale to raise funds for those displaced by the disaster being held at a roadside café as I drove south from Mount Cook to Queenstown; workmen checking the foundations of Te Papa Tongarewa – the reputedly earthquake-proof (and superb) national museum in the capital Wellington.

I penned a blog for this site at the time, which argued that, for all the horror of the headlines, New Zealand is a fabulous place to visit – and needed tourist interest more than ever in the aftermath of the quake. This view seemed to divide opinion, with some comments suggesting that it was too soon for the country to be the focus of holidays.

And yet, whatever nature seems to launch at it, New Zealand remains a destination of raw and rugged appeal. In fact, the very thing that launched the country onto the newspaper front pages last year – its precarious location on fault-lines that are both notoriously tetchy and prolific in their tantrums – is precisely what makes it a place of fascination for the travel pages. Often dismissed as a slightly cutesy add-on to a fortnight in Australia (you can thank the hobbits for that), in reality, there is a rough-hewn grandeur to New Zealand that can surprise new arrivals – from the sky-clawing bulk of Mount Cook (see above), the placid beauty of Lake Te Anau and the glacial trench of Milford Sound on the South Island, to the volcanic crater of Lake Taupo and the forested glory of the Coromandel Peninsula on the North Island.

None of this will bring back those killed in February 2011, or rebuild Christchurch Cathedral. But equally, the sad images from that troubled city should not discourage potential visitors from seeing a country whose charm is not always fully understood.

09 March 2012 2:39 PM

Travel agents and tour operators are getting hot under the collar about government-backed efforts to encourage British people to stay at home this summer to support the UK tourism industry.

Mark Tanzer, chief executive of ABTA, The Travel Association is extremely annoyed about the Government backing a campaign which favours domestic tourism over the ‘already-struggling’ international tourism market.

'We are very concerned that the Government is sponsoring a marketing campaign that appears to actively discourage UK holidaymakers from taking a foreign break: I’m sure the public want to make up their own mind about where to go on holiday. The outbound tourism industry employs hundreds of thousands of people throughout the UK and generates £27 billion annually in direct spend, making a fundamental and significant contribution to the economic health of the country.'

What he seems to be saying is that if British people want to support Britain they should go abroad for their holidays… and, besides, what business is it of the Government where we choose to take our annual break?

This is all total baloney, of course. Surely there can be no better time for the UK Government to try and persuade people to support British holidays than in this year of all years (London Olympics, Queen’s Diamond Jubilee etc).

The more pertinent point here is what business it is of ABTA to try and tell the Government what it should be doing?

Foreign package holidays have ruled the roost for the past 50 years: domestic UK tourism has been largely neglected and unloved by the Government. Why, for example, is there no Ministry for Tourism given the amount of cash the industry generates?

If the foreign holiday business is having tough times, well that’s business for you – what goes up can also come down. I don’t see how ABTA can expect the Government to think about supporting foreign holidays that take money from the UK economy.

Instead of sniping at domestic tourism, surely it should be in travel agencies’ interests to find a way in which they can help promote UK as well as foreign tourism. ABTA needs to wake up and smell the English Breakfast Tea...

07 March 2012 12:45 PM

There are few things that speak quite as loudly of the wonderful globe-trotting possibilities of travel as the inky stamp that lands in your passport – with the thump of the bureaucratic fist slamming downwards – when you cross a distant frontier.

In many ways, these colourful transit-tattoos are finer souvenirs of an international journey than a hundred pieces of local jewellery or a thousand 'I ♥ NYC' T-shirts. They are precise records of your progress from one realm to another, declaring the exact day you visited a certain country. And they stay with you for a lifetime – still spinning their tale even when your passport has expired and been thrown to the back of a draw.

At least, this is roughly what I found myself thinking two weeks ago when I stepped off a ferry on the edge of the River Plate, and back onto Argentinian soil.

I had just taken a day-jaunt from Buenos Aires to Colonia del Sacramento – a Uruguayan outpost, founded as a Portuguese settlement in the 17th century, that sits almost directly opposite the Argentinian capital on the far side of this grand estuary (and wears its colonial past with a real flourish. See the photo below – more on this in a later feature.). So close is this nugget of history to Buenos Aires that it lurks just an hour away by catamaran – but visiting it (obviously) involves two border crossings. And so four new stamps (two exit, two entry) had appeared in my passport as a result. Not bad, I decided, for an eight-hour round-trip of barely 60 miles.

Neither the Argentinian stamp (compact, stoic, and printed in the staunch shade of blue that crops up everywhere in South America’s most intriguing country), nor the Uruguayan (larger, a touch more florid and stamped in green ink), is especially showy. Which is no bad thing – although it leaves them a little short of the pomp and authority of the biggest and brashest passport stamps (Africa is an excellent source of these).

Ideally – in my opinion – the perfect passport stamp should be ever so slightly smudged, thanks to the enthusiasm of its imprinting on paper by a stern man in a peaked cap – but not so blurry that you cannot read the name of the exotic country you are visiting. And it should also be unnecessarily large, perhaps spreading out to take up an entire page – a happily ironic twist if the country itself is pretty small. Extra marks should also be given for artistic effort. Until recently, the Seychelles passport stamp used the elegant curves of the Coco de Mer fruit (the island chain’s most famous item of flora) – the outline of which, depending on how lascivious you are feeling, bears a distinct resemblance to the naked female figure.

Thinking about this (passport stamps, not the naked female figure) also made me realise that – time-honoured tradition that it is – the passport stamp is surely a dying breed. A few weeks ago, Max Wooldridge blogged on this site about the printed guide book’s gradual descent into irrelevance in this era of smart-phones and instantly accessible online information – and the passport stamp is undoubtedly destined to go the same way, doomed to vanish into some Travel Room 101.

For in a world of high-tech computers and body scanners, the era when a country keeps an eye on who is within its borders by banging a patch of ink into a small booklet is most certainly coming to an end. If you have renewed your passport in the last half a decade, it will probably have that small golden symbol on the front that denotes it as biometric-enabled, 'entitling' you to pass through the electronic gates that now wait at many airports (including Heathrow – although, every time I pass through, these shiny new gadgets seem to be roped off behind barriers or simply out of order) – which notch up your arrival at your destination with a quick glance at your irises, a check of a remote database and not a second of human interaction.

Then there is the fact that passport stamps are increasingly only 'on offer' if you cross to another continent. I renewed my own passport last year (hence my delight at picking up four stamps in one day) – and when I consigned the old one to the bottom of the desk, I flicked through and noted that many of the stamps it held are no longer available to British travellers. Malta, Poland, Bulgaria – the expansion of the EU, and the re-defining of what constitutes a border, means that officialdom now shows no interest in physically marking your passport if you travel to Valletta, Warsaw or Sofia.

Perhaps my sadness at this makes me old-fashioned, a Luddite railing at the dawn. But I can't help feeling that, on the day you can venture to Beijing, Moscow, Bogota or Nairobi, and return without a memory of it emblazoned in your personal documents, the travel experience will have lost one of the things that makes it special.

Share this article:

02 March 2012 4:12 PM

A couple of weeks ago in this slot I achieved what I thought was the impossible: I annoyed the Bejazus (to use an expression) out of Ryanair.

This reverses the natural order of things; in real life Ryanair exists to irritate us, we don’t expect to get them hot under the collar. But I did it.

My blog began: ‘Everyone knows you as Dan, so when a friend takes advantage of a Ryanair £9 special offer and books a group flight to Barcelona, he buys your ticket in the name of "Dan Smith".’

For the piece I adopted the subjunctive which (thanks Wikipedia) ‘is a verb mood typically used in subordinate clauses to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred’.

Briefly, I wasn’t describing an actual event (which would have begun: ‘On 4 January Dan Smith booked a ticket to Barcelona…’ – I was describing a possible scenario.

My piece continued: ‘When you get to the airport, someone from Ryanair checks your ticket and passport and sees that your name is actually "Daniel". "Dan" or "Daniel" – what’s the difference? Well the person from Ryanair tells you that the cost of adding the absent "iel" to the name in your ticket incurs a charge of £160. This is ludicrous, you protest – how could any airline, even Ryanair, claim that the work involved in changing your name by three letters amounts to 16 times the cost being charged for flying you all the way from the UK to Spain?’

Frank imagined a scene in an airport

In the blog I imagined a possible Ryanair response: ‘Not my problem, says the Ryanair person: it’s your responsibility to make sure your name is spelt correctly – if you don’t like the penalty charge then fly with somebody else (this is the default Ryanair position to all complaints!).’

A few days after writing the blog I was surprised to receive an email from Ryanair communications director Stephen McNamara: ‘I trust you are well and rested from your trip to Barcelona? Can I trouble you for details of your travel companion Dan Smith so that I can ask our Customer Service team to look into this – generally there are no changes for minor name changes.’

As I hadn’t been to Barcelona, I couldn’t think what he meant by my ‘travel companion’. Further requests for information about ‘Daniel Smith’ were sent before I made the connection with my blog and explained that I was describing a hypothetical situation rather than an actual event (which he must have known given his likely access to the Ryanair reservations system).

At this point Ryanair’s very own PR gladiator decided to unleash hell:

'I am disappointed to learn that you published an article in which you falsely accused Ryanair of charging a passenger £160 for a minor name change, and in doing so falsely claimed that the passenger "Dan Smith" was told by a Ryanair agent "Not my problem, it’s your responsibility to make sure your name is spelt correctly – if you don’t like the penalty charge then fly with somebody else."

Ryanair has revolutionised air travel

'Indeed you offered your own opinion to this "response" in which you wrongly stated this is the "default Ryanair position to all complaints."

'I cannot accept your assertion, in our recent correspondence, that the fictitious nature of this complaint was "clear from the conditional way it was written" and I must insist that a correction/clarification (in an equally prominent position) appears in the next edition of the various formats in which these false claims appeared (paper/website/blog) so that your readers, our passengers and the various "policy makers" and bored MEP’s who may have mistakenly believed that this occurred, are clear that it was made up.

'Ryanair does not levy a charge for a minor name change and only a substantial or total name change attracts a charge. Ryanair does not have a "default position" when it comes to customer issues, and any passenger may contact Ryanair by post, fax or webform and receive a full response within 14 working days."

The lady protests too much, I think (thanks Shakespeare) and said as much in my reply to Mr McNamara who apparently was still continuing to nurse Ryanair’s wounded pride.

'Dear Frank,

'I do not understand why you produced such an article without first contacting us – we are always available for such queries. We take criticism constructively – when it is warranted.

'However, can you appreciate that MEP’s may be moved to take action against airlines on such an issue – using your writing as evidence of a problem that does not exist? Hence, we need a clarification.

'I am simply correcting an article that wrongly (and without any justification) claims that Ryanair charged a passenger for a name change, and taunted them while doing so - and even though you admit the whole thing was not based in fact, you think that I should feel "shame" for addressing it correctly! Truly bizarre.

'Feel free to contact me with future queries to ensure factual commentary – we can generally reply within 24 hours on queries sent during the working week.

'Regards,

'Stephen'

From this exchange, it’s possible to draw several interesting conclusions. The most fascinating is that Ryanair seems to care very much about what European Members of Parliament think about its behaviour (it clearly fears further EU regulation).

Secondly, underneath that apparent blasé attitude to people’s opinions, Ryanair is aware of making sure it is portrayed fairly.

I bow to no-one in my admiration for what Ryanair has achieved. It has done more for the cause of affordable air travel than almost any other carrier in the history of international aviation. It is to be applauded to the echoes for its success.

But great success brings great responsibilities. Becoming the biggest in any field requires some humility. As Google is discovering, we consumers don’t like being taken for granted.